Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
24 DGA QUARTERLY I'm a stickler for depth of field, which allowed Will to be slightly soft. Because he's moving around so much, ILM was able to morph different takes of Will on the wire seamlessly. It took weeks of cutting. Tommy turns toward the background and says, "You're doing great, Ace," which was hard to time. I'm also having to watch performance and make sure that Tommy is flat enough and not trying to be funny; that Patrick Breen has the right amount of nervousness without mugging. And I'm watch- ing the car in the background to say, "Okay, I'm going to guess after this number of seconds that Will will pop out." Other directors would have used coverage, but I find editing is the enemy of comedy and that nothing kills comedy more than close-ups. When Will is slammed into the roof of the car, he's on wires being dropped, pulled up, and dropped onto blue-painted stunt pads with a slightly thicker foamy surface. If the stunt pad was too soft, he would go into it and you would miss his face, and you wouldn't believe he's hitting a hard surface. This way he could react. Another rule I have about comedies: you only want one funny person in the scene. Every day, for 108 days of shooting, I had to stop Tommy from be- ing funny. He would stare at me like he wanted to kill me. I had to tell his agent, "Only Will should be 'funny.' But I promise that Tommy will be funnier than Will because the actor reacting is always fun- nier than the actor doing the action." There are rules [for] depth of field. If Tommy and Patrick Breen are six feet away from the camera and Will is 40 feet away, we had to make him a certain amount of out of focus. So many visual effects shows these days look like video games because they don't obey the laws of physics. His rigging was different depending on which direction he was being pulled—one rig- ging for lifting him up and down and smashing into the roof of the car, another to pull him left, another to pull him right, etc. So, this is probably eight or 12 different takes of different shots. It never feels animated except in the mo- ment where Will is dragged by one of the tentacles into the car; the morph is about two frames too fast and on the verge of not being believable. Then you see the car bouncing up and down because you can only imagine what's going on inside—and because the whole foreground play was live and there was going to be no cutting—we had to decide how long to let it bounce and imag- ine how long it would be funny. I didn't shoot a safety angle. I felt it had to work as one shot, and I might as well not shoot any coverage because if I have to use it, I've failed. 7 8 9 10 7 8 9 10